Category Archives: business

My Dad met a woman in her early 60s who went back to work as a flight attendant on Jet Blue. Which is a fine and excellent occupation. But she also just got a real estate license, and her plan is to buy houses in Culver City for around $600,000 – $900,000, fix them up, and then flip them—for much more, presumably.

Maybe she doesn’t have the cash to pull off the purchases in the first place. Maybe she won’t be able to get the mortgages. Maybe it’s all hot air.

But maybe it isn’t. In the last two years a real estate frenzy seems to have built up in some markets. The flight attendant needs to find a greater fool before she gets crushed by the carry costs of the houses she’s buying or trying to buy.

Have you seen The Big Short, or read the book? History is repeating itself. The car loan market is already flashing warning signs. That woman’s whole financial life is going to fall apart if she starts trying to flip and the housing market falls.

People who bought real estate in 2009 – 2012 look like geniuses today. But by 2017, the people who bought from 2014 – 2016 might not look geniuses. I hear a lot of people around my age who want to buy stuff because they feel like they’ll be priced out forever if they don’t. That’s the kind of talk that makes me nervous.

In college all everyone talked about was art, drugs, ideas, sex, and parties. The shift to real estate and mortgages is a worrisome one.

Like this:

In “Sony’s latest camera and some disappointing sensor sales results,” Phillip Greenspun writes that the reward for Sony’s technically innovative sensors has been flat or declining sales. That’s because Sony misses the point: The number one thing camera companies need to do is integrate with Facebook. Camera companies have no one but themselves to blame for their decline. Way back in 2011 Flip Video had a plan for Wi-Fi enabled video cameras that had a Vine- or YouTube-like social system and interface. Every Flip camera was going to have Wi-Fi as a first-class feature. Cisco unfortunately killed Flip right before the launch, but Flip was at least a company that understood what was happening. In the intervening year zero camera companies have attempted to do what Flip was ready to launch.

Which is an amazing story in the annals of corporate stupidity. For the vast majority of people images are ways of signaling: signaling their character, their sense of fun, their sexuality, their lives. Image quality is not terribly important for that purpose, and image quality became “good enough” for most people with the iPhone 4 (which, not coincidentally, Instagram was founded). In 2010. Six years ago. Normal people don’t do detailed technical comparisons of their phone cameras. At most they ask, “Is yours good?” and the reply is usually “Yeah, it’s pretty good.”

The camera companies are technical geniuses and social morons. They ignore the absolute most important use case for 95 – 98% of their market. By now it may be too late to attract users accustomed to high-quality smartphone interfaces. But the camera companies are still barely even fine. The interface for getting photos from the modern cameras I have to my phone is horrific.

Apart from a relative handful of nerds like me, no one gives a shit about image quality once it reaches some acceptable level that it reached long ago. No one wants to recharge batteries or stick the SD card in the computer. For the last five or so years every camera iteration has gotten better autofocus and better low-light performance and a host of other handy but marginal features that no one cares about except professionals and Internet gear wankers.

I wrote about this dynamic in “Photography and Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over.” Others have written about it elsewhere. In that post I also observed that photography companies are also marketing morons. They still are. Greenspun is excited by the release of the Sony A6300. That camera is technically incredible. It also has a terrible name that likely means nothing to 99% of readers of this blog. Except for people who follow cameras with the passion normal people reserve for sports or celebrities, “A6300” means nothing. Sony is missing the main point with its sensors and its cameras. They need more anthropologists / sociologists and fewer outright engineers.

A great essay can be the difference in tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, salaries, interest, and hours worked. Consequently and not surprisingly, smart people realize that the right essay right is insanely important. Bess does them right. I’m a biased party, but if I didn’t think she were really, really good at this genre I’d be silent instead of effusive. I’ve seen her work and acknowledge that she has savant-like skills. One could even offer the ultimate praise and say she has freak-level skills in this domain. Her prices are incredibly reasonable given the services offered.

I’ve seen her conjure up essays, but I’ve also seen her apply those skills in other domains. I’m a professional writer and struggled with the right tone for the query pitch and then dust jacket for Asking Anna. Bess came up with the first, key line:

Maybe marriage would be like a tumor: something that grows on you with time. At least that’s what Steven Deutsch thinks as he fingers the ring in his pocket, trying to decide whether he should ask Anna Sherman to marry him. Steven is almost thirty, going on twenty, and the future still feels like something that happens to other people. Still, he knows Anna won’t simply agree to be his long-term girlfriend forever.

When Steven flies to Seattle for what should be a routine medical follow up, he brings Anna and hits on a plan: he’ll introduce her to his friends from home and poll them about whether, based on their immediate judgment, he should ask Anna. But the plan goes awry when old lovers resurface, along with the cancer Steven thought he’d beaten, and the simple scheme he hoped would solve his problem does everything but.

Wow. This isn’t the sort of skill that can be easily taught or even articulated. Essays for schools and residencies are so short but so key. Bess manages to elicit important information from applicants, decide how it should be structured, and then phrase it in ways that win. She’s an artist for the best self.

Like this:

In “What is the welfare cost of Amazon supply restrictions on books?” Tyler Cowen writes on whether Amazon’s much-publicized maneuvers against publishers are welfare-enhancing or welfare-destroying; most of the former answers tend to come from readers and indie publishers, while most of the latter answers tend to come from publishers and established authors. I however was compelled to comment on a separate and to my mind under-discussed issue: the lack of any sense of history in most of these discussions.

The same class of writers who five years ago were aghast at the lack of support for literary fiction among publishers now decry Amazon; they’re supporting the same publishers who were until recently the cravenly commercial forces destroying “quality” literary fiction. “The plight of literary fiction” has been an evergreen essay topic for as long as I’ve been cognizant of literary culture. Literary fiction was (or is) in plight because publishers supposedly don’t support and readers are too busy masturbating to romance fiction or science fiction tech fantasies (or whatever) to read lit fic.

Tangentially, I’m also amazed that, in rereading the preceding sentence, it seems to make sense and flow nicely without any commas. Perhaps it is the influence of Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, which I bought naturally from Amazon and which has me thinking about nesting and recursion more than any time since CS 102.

It’s hard to be first at anything in America, but yesterday I was the very first Uber Fresh lunch delivery customer. Uber, which is of course taking on the taxi cartels with reasonable success, is trying to become something like a local Amazon–delivering restaurant meals, late-night rolling papers and condoms, for example, or taking the dog to the groomer, and so on. Since no one—including Uber or Amazon—actually knows how to do this, Uber chose this week to test the lunch delivery market in my neighborhood, Downtown Santa Monica.

Downtown SaMo,* as we locals call it, is Santa Monica’s version of the East Village, where Jake lives now, Capitol Hill in Seattle, where he once lived. Which is to say, the area is composed of lots of apartment buildings occupied either by young hipsters like Jake or geezers like me, but few people in between, since the in-betweeners are in prime family time. In Santa Monica, lots of earnest bars selling hand-crafted $12 cocktails ($15 in the East Village), $20 small plates of roasted beets and kale, and $5 cups of pour-over coffee. The tragically hip Funnel Mill coffee shop two blocks from me actually sells $90/cup Kopi Luwak Civet Shit coffee, which Jake and I did not try when he last visited.

In short Downtown SaMo is perfect to test Uber Fresh. This week Uber is testing is a single lunch selection from a local restaurant each day, starting yesterday, which is delivered for $12—including the Uber driver’s cut. At 11:30 AM I placed my order using the Uber app and, as promised, the Uber guy showed up within ten minutes. That’s a big improvement on most delivery, which can take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to never.

Unlike ordering from Eat24 or GrubHub, however, the Uber driver won’t come upstairs, so I met him at the curb. To me this is a big negative: by the time I overcome inertia sufficiently to get myself together to go downstairs, I might as well continue out the door to the dozens of takeout places within a few blocks of me. Death to inconvenience! That could be the rallying cry of a lot of modern consumer-facing startups. It’s not a bad tagline for my own company, Seliger + Associates.

Anyway, the driver turned out to be the typical Uber driver with an an odd, vaguely Eastern European name and accent, accompanied by an Uberette in her late 20s. She popped out of car with a big smile and a free cookie and declared I was the very first Uber Fresh delivery! It helps that the Uber Development Office is nearby.

But how was the food? The lunch was from Tender Greens, an LA-based salad bar chain, which is okay but not exciting. This described lunch, which consisted of a cup of tepid chicken soup, an ordinary Caesar Salad, and, in my case, a very tasty cookie. The best part the container: a nifty black Uber bag. Sort of a party favor or “party favorite,” as Jake’s younger sister used to call them when she was about four.

Although being Customer Numero Uno was interesting, I wouldn’t rush to order Uber Fresh again anytime soon. The food was kind of meh, fairly expensive at $12 and, since I had to go downstairs anyway, I could have walked to about 20 lunch places in ten minutes. As a business, the single-meal option is interesting but also problematic given the target demographic, since just about every resident of SaMo (or the East Village or Capitol Hill), except me, has some kind of food concern/issue, and most will want a vegan/gluten free/non-GMO or something alternative. Jake doesn’t like simple carbs, for example. But, as Joe Bob Briggs likes to say, you might want to check it out.

Like many people with such businesses, some friends with a design consulting business say they’re getting jerked around by potential clients. While they’re worried about offending potential clients and don’t want to lose the business, they also don’t like being plied for free samples and they don’t like long conversations that aren’t likely to go anywhere. In the course of talking to them, I realized that they’re discovering that the lessons they’ve taken from school and every day life are wrong or at least not optimal. So I described my own experiences as a consultant and how that taught me about reality and money.

A lot of us—including me—are told from an early age to be polite, take turns, be considerate of other people’s feelings, etc. This is good advice in many but not all circumstances. Among friends you do want to take turns and reciprocate interests and be warm to other people who are warm. That’s how you build lasting friendship networks. In the business / consultant worlds, however, being overly polite and considerate often leads other people to take advantage of you. Consultants need one very important skill: they need to figure out who is going to give them money and who isn’t. They need to do so relatively quickly. Clients often press to get as much free stuff—often in the form of time and opinions that should cost hundreds of dollars an hour—as they can. They lose nothing by dallying and often gain stuff. Consultants need to learn the killer instinct necessary to know when to stop and say “send me a contract and check or don’t call me until you want to.” Almost all successful consultant learn how to do this and learn when to say no.

(c) Victor WeFoto.com

“Talk is cheap” is a cliché for a reason: it doesn’t mean anything. Any talk that’s not a billable hour should be leading, rapidly, to a billable hour. At some point—a point sooner than most novices realize—it’s time to pay or go away. Money talks and isn’t cheap: I’ve been on numerous calls about “collaborations” and what not, when the real thing happens is through subcontracts. I learned to end vapid conversations about “collaboration” that don’t go anyway. Show me the money, or it doesn’t exist.

Someone who wants to hire you knows relatively quickly whether they want to hire you. Anything other than “yes” means “no.” “Maybe” means no. “Later” means no. That’s a hard thing for many of us to accept. My parents founded Seliger + Associates 20 years ago and they learned, the hard way, about how potential clients dangle work that never arrives and waste a lot of valuable time and energy. That means consultants have to get to “no.”

Getting to “no” is actually quite useful and a big improvement over a nebulous maybe. Attention is often your most valuable resource. Don’t let it dissipate over weak leads.

Drawing a clear line can actually turn some “maybes” in “yeses.” Clients will respect you more if you eventually stop negotiating, talking, or communicating unless they pay.

Because of the issues described in the paragraphs above, anyone experienced learns when to stop talking and say “money or nothing.” That means continuing to flirt without cash in hand is also a signal of being inexperienced. The line between being brusque and being direct is thin but when it doubt err on the side of directness rather than meekness.

Directness can actually be a kind of politeness. “Professional courtesy” has an adjective before “courtesy” because it’s different from regular courtesy. Professional courtesy indicates that there’s a different way of being courteous than the conventional way, and one aspect of professional courtesy is there to avoid time wasting people.

That being said, it can be worth exploring new ventures even when those new ventures aren’t immediately remunerative. But money and contracts separate exploration from reality.

These lessons aren’t only applicable to consultant. They apply to almost any form of business and for that matter in dating: if she says “I like you but not in that way,” she means no. I think men tend to learn this faster then women do, in part because men usually conduct the initial approach to women for dating and sex. There are of course exceptions to this, but as a general principle it holds.[1]

(c) looking4poetry

My friends are women, and from what I’ve observed guys in their teens have to learn to approach women and risk rejection if they’re going to get anywhere, and a lot of women wait for guys to approach them.

Consequently, guys who want to get anywhere have to get used to rejection in a way a lot of women don’t, and that socialization is probably part of the reason why women like Sheryl Sandberg write books like Lean In. Men figure out relatively early that they have to lean in—or suffer. Like a lot of guys I spent time suffering. I also learned, however, that with women too anything other than “yes” means “no” and that I should move on quickly. Sticking around to beg and plead only worsens the situation.

Disengagement is underrated. In many endeavors one important ingredient in success is fire and motion.

[1] See Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller’s book Mate for a long description of how and why men tend to initially approach women (giving men the choice of who to approach), women tend to accept or decline sex (giving women the choice of saying yes or no) and men tend to accept or reject long-term relationships (giving men the choice of say yes or no to becoming “official” or “married” or otherwise socially sanctioned).

You may think these principles are bogus or unfair, which is fine, and if you want to change society itself, I wish you luck, but you should at least know they exist. Even among my female friends who identify as hard-core feminists, very rarely will make the initial approach to men in a sex / dating context.